After giving users a little while to fully complete their Pigpens, Zynga has officially unleashed the world of Truffle Hunting into FarmVille. Please note that this feature, as with most large-scale features, is rolling out to users slowly. If you don’t see the following feature in your own game the next time you login, don’t be distressed, as it will come to you in time!

Truffle Hunting is a fairly simple system that sees you using bushels to create slop for your pigs. Feed a pig slop and they’ll be ready to hunt for Truffles on your neighbors’ farms. Better pigs give better truffles, and better truffles can be traded in for prizes, including all new pigs! Let’s take a closer look at this new feature.

Once you receive the pop-up announcing the feature, you can access it by clicking on your Pigpen and “looking inside.” From there, your first task will be to “Make Slop.” This is done by clicking on the “Make Slop” button under the trough. You’ll then see your current Bushel inventory, and can choose which exact bushel you’d like to use to make slop.

For each individual bushel you use, you’ll earn a single unit of slop, which can feed a single pig. If you don’t see your slop total rise (you can hold 10 slop units at any one time), you might need to refresh the page.

Slop in hand, you can now click on a pig and send it truffle hunting. This is an instant process, and if your pig returns with a truffle (not every trip is successful) you’ll see a screen like the one below, allowing you to click on the “Share” button to post a news item directly to that neighbors’ wall, giving them the truffle you found. Hopefully, your friend will be kind enough to give you back a truffle, as a way of thanks.

When your friends accept their truffle, they can either claim the truffle for themselves only, or they can claim the truffle and send one directly back to you.

Either way, each pig that goes on a truffle hunt will need to return and rest, limiting the amount of truffle hunting you can do at any one time to the amount of pigs you have in your Pigpen. Unfortunately, pigs need to rest for two days before they can hunt again.

Once you start accumulating truffles, whether brown, black or otherwise, they will appear in your gift box. From there, you can “use” them to be given the reward instantly. One reward might be a Black Pig, received from a Brown Truffle, for instance. You can then choose to share your reward with friends by posting a news item to your wall. Whatever prize you receive – in our example, the Black Pig – you’ll have one extra to share, available to the first person that clicks on your wall post. Other prizes include Strawberry Pigs, Potbelly Pigs, Hula Pigs, Javelina Pigs, White Pigs, and even Miniature Pigs.

We’ll be sure to update this space as we learn what other prizes are available through this event, but for now, make sure to head over to the game’s page to see if you’re one of the lucky few who already has access to Truffle Hunting.

UDPATE: Zynga has posted on their forums with the following message regarding Truffle Hunting:

Please note: Due to technical issues, this feature has been temporarily disabled for all users. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and we hope to have Truffle Hunting re-released in the near future.

So there you have it, folks. Truffle Hunting has been switched off for the time being. We’ll keep you up to date when more information is available.

UPDATE x2: It appears as though things have returned to normal – Truffle Hunting is once again available and should be functioning properly for all users.